Steering a Path to Acceptance for Gay Israelis

WHEN moviegoers last saw the stoic young Israeli Army officer Yossi, he had lost a fellow soldier in a botched ambush along the mountainous, snow-covered border of Lebanon. Yossi stood by silently as a young woman told the mother of the dead soldier, named Jagger, that she had been his girlfriend, a fantasy that might have brought some comfort to the bereaved parents. But Yossi alone knew the truth: He had been Jagger’s lover.

Ten years later this survivor from the director Eytan Fox’s groundbreaking 2002 Israeli film, “Yossi & Jagger,” is back in “Yossi,” opening in New York on Friday.

During the decade since the first film came out, the treatment of gay and lesbian Israelis has undergone a liberalizing transformation, and the country’s cinema has experienced a creative renaissance. Mr. Fox has been a central figure in both cases.

In much the way that “Will & Grace” and “Modern Family” have been credited with advancing the cultural acceptance of gay men and lesbians in the United States, Mr. Fox’s films anticipated societal change by being the first to portray gay Israeli men in everyday situations and free of stereotypes.

But when we encounter Yossi again in Mr. Fox’s new film he has the dulled affect of someone suffering from depression, merely going through the motions of his life. Ten years after Jagger’s death Yossi is still in the closet.

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The film director Eytan Fox at his home in Tel Aviv.CreditRina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

“I had left Yossi in such a difficult place, maybe even a tragic place, that I had this need to go back to him, to start a process of healing,” Mr. Fox said by telephone from his home in Tel Aviv. “It was a way for me to go back to not only where Yossi was 10 years ago but to go back to who I was 15 or 20 years ago.”

At that time there had been one notable Israeli filmmaker devoting his work to the portrayal of gay men. From the 1970s to the early ’90s Amos Guttman made movies about gay men at odds with a hostile environment. (Mr. Guttman died of AIDS-related causes in 1993.)

“When I was 17 years old, I drove to Tel Aviv to watch his first feature film,” Mr. Fox said of Mr. Guttman’s “Drifting.” “I was moved to see people going to see a movie with a gay character.” On the other hand, he was disturbed that the character was on the fringes of society, cruising for sex in public parks. “I thought, I don’t want to be gay if that’s what gay means.”

That realization fueled Mr. Fox’s resolve to be a different kind of gay director. “I started my first short film with an Israeli flag because I fought in a war, I know the Israeli songs by heart,” he said. “I am not an Amos Guttman character. I don’t live in these underground bars. I’m gay, and I’m a part of Israel.”

The author Nir Cohen, who devoted nearly a quarter of his recent book, “Soldiers, Rebels and Drifters: Gay Representation in Israeli Cinema” (Wayne State University Press), to Mr. Fox’s films, said: “He situated gay characters and gay issues at the heart of Israeli life. At the same time he’s one of the most popular filmmakers in Israel.”

Mr. Cohen argues that Mr. Fox’s films paved the way for movies like “Eyes Wide Open,” a 2009 Israeli film about love between two Orthodox Jewish men. “That probably wouldn’t have been made without the influence of Eytan Fox.”

According to Ohad Knoller, who played Yossi in both films, “Yossi & Jagger” changed the way Israeli films portray not just gay images but the military. “The army is supposed to be very serious,” he said. “But it’s real life. And if you want to tell a story of young people, young people are living in the army.”

Mr. Fox followed “Yossi & Jagger” with “Walk on Water” in 2004 and two years later with “The Bubble,” about gay men falling in love across the Israeli-Palestinian divide. More recently he made “Mary Lou,” a musical mini-series for television that has been compared to “Glee.”

Now 48, Mr. Fox found his creative voice when he studied film at Tel Aviv University, alongside Ari Folman, who went on to make the Oscar-nominated “Waltz With Bashir,” and Hagai Levi, who created “BeTipul,” on which the HBO series “In Treatment” was based.

He also found his voice as a gay man. “While at Tel Aviv University I had a partner, and I felt strong enough to say to friends and family: This is the life I’ve chosen and I want you to love me for it.” (Gal Uchovsky, Mr. Fox’s partner of nearly 25 years, was a producer of “Yossi & Jagger” and is a leading cultural commentator.)

When Mr. Fox came out to his father, Seymour Fox, then the director of education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his father was devastated. But the elder Mr. Fox entered therapy for the first time in his life. “He was in his 60s,” Eytan Fox said. “He changed. He became a better father to me and my brothers and a better husband to our mother.” (His father died in 2006.)

In the new film Yossi meets a young, openly gay soldier. The journey that follows seems to mirror that taken by Mr. Fox and many gay men in Israel. Let’s just say the movie could have been titled, “How Yossi Got His Groove Back.”

“Yossi was a victim of the Israel he grew up in,” said Mr. Fox. “He fears there’s a contradiction between being an Israeli man and being gay. That was the world I grew up in.”

Intriguingly, “Yossi” reveals the title character’s surname to be Guttman, a seeming nod to Mr. Guttman the director and, in turn, the struggle for gay men to shed their self-hatred and emerge from the shadows of society. But Mr. Fox said the name is pure coincidence. “I didn’t think about it,” he said, then conceded, “Sometimes you don’t know everything you’re doing.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR17 of the New York edition with the headline: Steering a Path To Acceptance For Gay Israelis. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe